INSTALLATION

There are several ways to install cpanminus to your system.

Package management system

There are Debian packages, RPMs, FreeBSD ports, and packages for other operation systems available. If you want to use the package management system, search for cpanminus and use the appropriate command to install. This makes it easy to install cpanm to your system without thinking about where to install, and later upgrade.

Installing to system perl

You can also use the latest cpanminus to install cpanminus itself:

curl -L https://cpanmin.us | perl - --sudo App::cpanminus

This will install cpanm to your bin directory like /usr/local/bin and you'll need the --sudo option to write to the directory, unless you configured INSTALL_BASE with local::lib.

Installing to local perl (perlbrew, plenv etc.)

If you have perl in your home directory, which is the case if you use tools like perlbrew or plenv, you don't need the --sudo option, since you're most likely to have a write permission to the perl's library path. You can just do:

curl -L https://cpanmin.us | perl - App::cpanminus

to install the cpanm executable to the perl's bin path, like ~/perl5/perlbrew/bin/cpanm.

Downloading the standalone executable

You can also copy the standalone executable to whatever location you'd like.

cd ~/bin
curl -L https://cpanmin.us/ -o cpanm
chmod +x cpanm

This just works, but be sure to grab the new version manually when you upgrade because --self-upgrade might not work with this installation setup.

Troubleshoot: HTTPS warnings

When you run curl commands above, you may encounter SSL handshake errors or certification warnings. This is due to your HTTP client (curl) being old, or SSL certificates installed on your system needs to be updated.

You're recommended to update the software or system if you can. If that is impossible or difficult, use the -k option with curl or an alternative URL, https://git.io/cpanm

DEPENDENCIES

perl 5.8.1 or later.

'tar' executable (bsdtar or GNU tar version 1.22 are recommended) or Archive::Tar to unpack files.

C compiler, if you want to build XS modules.

make

Module::Build (core in 5.10)

QUESTIONS

How does cpanm get/parse/update the CPAN index?

It queries the CPAN Meta DB site at http://cpanmetadb.plackperl.org/. The site is updated at least every hour to reflect the latest changes from fast syncing mirrors. The script then also falls back to query the module at http://metacpan.org/ using its search API.

Upon calling these API hosts, cpanm (1.6004 or later) will send the local perl versions to the server in User-Agent string by default. You can turn it off with --no-report-perl-version option. Read more about the option with cpanm, and read more about the privacy policy about this data collection at http://cpanmetadb.plackperl.org/#privacy

Fetched files are unpacked in ~/.cpanm and automatically cleaned up periodically. You can configure the location of this with the PERL_CPANM_HOME environment variable.

Where does this install modules to? Do I need root access?

It installs to wherever ExtUtils::MakeMaker and Module::Build are configured to (via PERL_MM_OPT and PERL_MB_OPT).

By default, it installs to the site_perl directory that belongs to your perl. You can see the locations for that by running perl -V and it will be likely something under /opt/local/perl/... if you're using system perl, or under your home directory if you have built perl yourself using perlbrew or plenv.

If you've already configured local::lib on your shell, cpanm respects that settings and modules will be installed to your local perl5 directory.

At a boot time, cpanminus checks whether you have already configured local::lib, or have a permission to install modules to the site_perl directory. If neither, i.e. you're using system perl and do not run cpanm as a root, it automatically sets up local::lib compatible installation path in a perl5 directory under your home directory.

To avoid this, run cpanm either as a root user, with --sudo option, or with --local-lib option.

cpanminus can't install the module XYZ. Is it a bug?

It is more likely a problem with the distribution itself. cpanminus doesn't support or may have issues with distributions such as follows:

Tests that require input from STDIN.

Build.PL or Makefile.PL that prompts for input even when PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT is enabled.

Modules that have invalid numeric values as VERSION (such as 1.1a)

These failures can be reported back to the author of the module so that they can fix it accordingly, rather than to cpanminus.

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